Mar 29, 2008

"Take what you want and pay for it," says God.

The group of dons who met regularly in the nineteen fifties in the pub just before the Woodstock/Banbury Road fork called the Eagle and Child [or the Bird and Baby] had rather a large body of work to their credit.

JRR Tolkien has the Lord of the Rings, CS Lewis all the Narnia books, and Dorothy Sayers has all the Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, to name only a few. They were certainly a group, in the sense that through their contacts with each other they slowly evolved a view held by all, although the group included Roman Catholics, like Tolkien, and a large variety of Protestants.

Of particular note is the Pelican edition of Dante's Divine Comedy by Dorothy Sayers, where she approaches the notion of instantaneous self judgement - derived through Aristotle's application of Plato's principles through Aquinas and Dante. By committing a sin, you were rendering a judgement on yourself, and the instruments of your punishment, or reward, would always be fashioned by yourself, and the judgement executed instantaneously, by yourself on yourself. Ye pays yer money, and ye takes yer choice. "Take what you want and pay for it, says God," goes the Spanish proverb. Become what you want and pay for that, too. Neat, huh?

I read this, "Take what you want and pay for it, says God" in a novel by Tana French. She is quite good and the name of the novel is , The Likeness. I have not been able to get the saying out of my mind. I understand it better reading this meaning.